Robin Chase, co-founder of the world's largest car sharing company Zipcar as well as Buzzcar and Veniam, gave a lecture titled “How a New Organizational Paradigm is Changing the Way We Work, Build Businesses and Shape Economies” on Wednesday. Before her talk, she sat down with The Daily Princetonian to discuss transportation, the economy and entrepreneurship.
The Daily Princetonian: How did you first become interested in transportation and environmental issues?
Robin Chase: I had a co-founder — she was German — and she went to a café when she was in Berlin on vacation, and she looked across the street and saw a shared vehicle happening there. And so I said wow, great idea, that’s exactly what I want to have, which is a car to use sometimes just when I want and not have to own a whole car. Once I started doing transportation, that’s when I realized whoa, it’s the center of the universe! So it affects your access to opportunity, it affects where you can go to school, where you can get a job, which friends you can see, what fun things you can do. So if we want to build more opportunity we have to make sure people can get to those things.
From a climate perspective, I think I’ve been a relative environmentalist in that I have cared that we haven’t made things worse, for sure. It was only three years ago that I finally understood how severe and urgent and fast-moving this issue was. Scientists are saying that we will be warming the planet by eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. And what we don’t understand is what it feels like to warm a planet by eight degrees. And if we went to the last ice age, we are minus seven degrees Fahrenheit from today. So when scientists say it’s catastrophic, they are honestly really meaning catastrophic. We will have pushed into extinction 50 percent of the plants and animals on the planet.
DP: What first opened your eyes to the severity of the climate change crisis?
RC: People had said [that] the World Bank did this report called 4 degrees centigrade and you should really read it, so I said huh, maybe since I work in the environmental issues I really should read it. So I read the executive summary and when I read that summary, I was completely blown away. So we are at a moment of extreme emergency and what’s kind of interesting about that is that then people say, well why don’t you act like that? And I think when you walk around with that urgency, people stop listening, because you seem like a crazy person and you seem scary, and you don’t want to deal with it. But if you recognize it rationally and you just prioritize your life to the rational side, then you don’t have to keep reevaluating or reminding in your mind each and every second. You set the goal and you set the path, based on facts, and then you can back off and just not think about it at the top of your mind, because it’s too, too, too depressing.
DP: How did Zipcar really come about? You mentioned before that your co-founder went to Germany, and then how did Zipcar get started?
RC: So, she wasn’t my co-founder then, she was German, and [when] she went home for vacation, she saw the car sitting in the café in Berlin, and she came back home and she asked me. I think there really was a lightbulb that went on over my head, and what I saw in the fall of ’99 was that this was what the internet was made for: sharing very specific things easily and quickly among lots of people. I had three children, and a husband, and we had one car that he would take to work everyday, and I lived in the city, so I really only wanted a car by the hour. So it spoke to me, and I understood how technology could be used to do that. And to put it in context, in 1999 – and we launched in 2000 – only 25 percent of the people had cell phones, they definitely were not smart, and only 50 percent of the people had access to the internet, and that was at work. And so we built this thing that you could only reserve online, on the internet, and then later you could make a telephone call reservation. We were really on the front edge of lots of trends. So we guessed right and had good timing.
DP: How do you envision the future of the sharing economy, given the controversiality of companies like Uber and Airbnb over safety factors?
RC: When people think of the sharing economy, they’re thinking about physical assets that are being shared person-to-person, but what’s happening in a larger sense is that platforms are being built to harness excess capacity of all kinds and are inviting the participation of people outside the company to get it done.
Around the regulation piece, and these physical assets, there’s three different places that we regulate at. So one would be the government, which does regulations across everything. So they say you have to have your car inspected every six months because no one should be driving unsafe cars. Then, at the platform level, more regulations are being applied. So for Uber, if they do what they say they’re doing, they’re doing a background driving check on everyone. And then coming down to the third level, which is people, each and every time I ride in an Uber taxi, or I stay at an Airbnb house, I rate it at that exact moment.
One last piece on these regulations is there’s three types of regulations: we should regulate to protect the public safety and protect the public good. Those are good things and I believe in them; no one should be putting public safety at risk. The second set of regulations include things that once made sense but now are old and don’t make any sense given the technology we have today. The third type of rule that gets created are just around to protect the status quo. We want to protect this industry, or this type of workers, and I think those are bad rules and I’m not interested in supporting old industries that need to change.
DP: What excites you most about what you’ve been doing and what you do now?
RC: What excites me about this new organization structure is that we need to transform world economies very, very fast, and this organizational structure makes that happen. So when I think about climate change I think wow, that’s why we really need to be doing things that leverage what’s happening today and we need to get lots of people working at it. So platforms can look at all of the activity that’s happening and they can analyze it and figure out best practice and say whoa, let’s do more this way, and they can look at worse practices until everyone stopped doing it that way. And the last piece is that when you have this Peers Inc collaboration with all these people, you can have a lot of experimentation and adaptation locally, so you can make things hyperlocal.
These are brand new tools that are exciting because they’re going to help us address climate at the speed and scale required. We’re recognizing and celebrating individuals’ unique aspects and able to bring those into the standardized industrial world that we’re used to having. Because of this new collaboration and because of the internet, we can now have the best of both worlds. We can celebrate and enjoy and value local, unique things and still bring them to scale. I think we’re at this moment where it’s kind of an exciting, new world. We started this conversation with the depressing future, but the flip upside is you and your generation, and I’m helping as much as I can — we have at this moment the ability to really reinvent world economies because they all are positively crumbling right now.
DP: What advice would you give young people who are interested in startups, entrepreneurship and innovation?
RC: My advice is to be intellectually honest and learn fast. Both of those things are tied. You have your idea, and you should be hyper-vigilant to what your skills are and what skills you have to bring around you and how that idea is unfolding in real time. There are bad ideas out there; realize if your idea is a bad one and ditch it before you spend your life at it. Evolve your ideas. How can you become a person or a company that learns as quickly as possible? Make yourself that company, because that’s how you beat out the old big companies, because big companies are not close to the ground — they’re not close to their customers, it takes them a year to figure out there’s a problem, it takes them a long time to respond — and that’s why entrepreneurs ever succeed. You can be told things and not learn them. Be honest about what you’re learning, and change and adapt as quickly as possible.
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